


The Fog Theory

by ofsjeon



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: M/M, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-04
Updated: 2017-09-04
Packaged: 2018-12-18 09:06:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11871072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofsjeon/pseuds/ofsjeon
Summary: Seokmin can't sleep. Seokmin has weird dreams. Seokmin sees Jihoon in his sleep.





	The Fog Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soonhan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soonhan/gifts).



> This is for the Seokshine collection! I hope you guys like it :)

Seokmin thinks it has something to do with the summer heat. The haze of the weather makes his limbs feel lethargic, sluggish. 

The oak tree he sits underneath of gives him shade that cools off the sweat licking the nape of his neck and down the spine of his back. His eyes are heavy and his head lolls on the trunk behind him. The whistling wind ruffles the leaves above him, some of the them falling to the ground. Seokmin couldn’t remember if he actually saw them blowing off to a little boy playing in the grass, or if it was all a figment of his imagination.

All he could comprehend was waking up to the shouting of his name and seeing all the other school kids rushing back in the school from the playground. 

“Seokmin, have you been sleeping well lately?” His teacher asked him one day after school. His mother was right there behind him, ready to speak for his silence. 

She nodded, insisting she checked on him every night, waiting to leave only until he had fallen asleep after she had tucked him in. 

That wasn’t a lie— on their part. 

Seokmin had a problem. He had a hard time sleeping at the same hour his peers would typically fall asleep at. Once he knew his parents were in their own room, too late into the night to check in on him again, Seokmin would lay in his bed, awake, and watch time pass on the digital clock beside him, glowing in the dark to keep him company. 

This was a relatively new problem for Seokmin, something he thought he’d grown out of since he graduated from the past time of naps and snack times in his early years of kindergarten. 

So now, here he is, lying at the young age of 6 years old to his parents and teacher about his sleeping habits and feeling betrayed by his own bodily functions. Seokmin wants to believe this is something most kids his age range goes through. 

By the time the three of them gets home, Seokmin feels awake and energized, as if he could run to the park and back with some kick in him left to spare. 

He doesn’t show it, of course. 

Seokmin eats his dinner quietly, pretending to yawn between every 15 bites. He’s not sure how well his mom can read into them, but she feigns enough ignorance to send him up to get ready for bed. 

By the time his mom knocks on his door after washing the dishes, Seokmin’s tucked himself in his blankets and began mentally counting sheep in his head to get a head start on possibly getting a few hours of shut eye tonight. Seokmin’s mom entered the room with a soft smile on her face, the corner of her lips lifting up just enough to reach her eyes. 

He’s been told they share the same smile.

“You feeling tired, Seokmin?”

He’s on 12 sheeps when Seokmin says, “Yeah” and feigns another practiced yawn.

His mother smiles once more, fixing the ruffled strands of hair pressed up on Seokmin’s forehead. “I was thinking, instead of reading you a story from a book, I could tell you a real life fairy tale.”

20 sheep have passed and Seokmin’s settling his head into his pillow comfortably, ready to listen. 

“Have you ever heard of soulmates, Seokmin?”

Seokmin nods yet again and he feels his heartbeat slowing down, the usual adrenaline he feels through his veins no longer flowing in his bloodstream. Seokmin’s mom smiles.

“Well, there’s something called the fog theory, and it has to do with you,” Seokmin’s mom puts her left index finger up in the air, right in front of Seokmin’s eyes. “And your soulmate,” And the right one comes up. “While you sleep.” Seokmin’s mom brings her fingers together, the two of them pressed against one another.

“Nobody really knows how it works, but the story goes: When one person is asleep, their soulmate will feel sleepy as well. And if that same person is awake, their soulmate won’t be able to go to sleep.” 

Seokmin doesn’t know how many sheep have passed. Was he on 33? Or maybe it was 35. He doesn’t dwell on it too much because his mom continues on.

“People say you know you’ve met your soulmate when you both start sharing the same dreams.” Seokmin can feel his eyelids growing heavier as his mother’s voice lulls him to a calm sleep. He’s forgotten how nice this feeling was at this time of night. 

“Are you feeling sleepy, Seokmin?” She combs her fingers through Seokmin’s hair, smiling softly at her own pliant child. 

Seokmin, too tired, too content, and too sleepy to even voice a response back, slides down his bed. He slips into his blankets, warm and cozy, and doesn’t even notice his mom tucking the sheets properly under his body and leaning up to give her child a soft kiss on his forehead. 

That night was one of the last nights he’s spent sleeping soundly through the night until he reached college.

//

Seokmin likes to blame the root of his unproductiveness and avoidance of all responsibilities on the stuffiness in his room when summer time came around. When the rise in temperature made it nearly impossible for him to think about anything other than how his shirt is sticking to his skin, Seokmin often succumbed to his discomfort. Even if he actually tried to get his homework done and studying out of the way, the buzzing of his fan was simply too loud to try and drown out-- at least that’s the most comforting excuse he could come up with when he just ends up sleeping the afternoon away. 

There’s a lot of things Seokmin likes blaming summertime on; one of them being his imagination lacking the creative spurr it usually has during any other season. When Seokmin’s mind flies away into dreamland, he ends up imagining the same thing as before. The unusual thing with this is, when Seokmin’s conscious enough to control the kind of visions he sees in his mind, it’s always the same thing.

Seokmin was too busy blaming the summer heat on everything to dwell on such trivial thoughts.

Seokmin is grateful however for having friends and roommates like Mingyu and Minghao who lack the same amount of tolerance in heat and sweat as him. So when they walk in his room to find him on his second movie for the afternoon after his “little” cat nap, they convey their concerns for him by trying to get him at least out his room.

“Seokmin, you know you’re not gonna pass your classes if you just keep watching illegally downloaded movies and sleeping the entire afternoon.” Mingyu says from Seokmin’s open door while he stays on his bed, staring at his buffering laptop screen.

“It’s been working for the past two years. Hasn’t exactly failed me too much.”

Seokmin knows he’ll regret wasting his time like this in the future when it matters, but for now he chooses to let the bliss of ignorance and breeze from his breaking electric fan lull him back to a gentle doze. 

He’s not given much of a chance to return back to his usual pattern of laziness when Mingyu and Minghao don’t leave his room though. First they simply make noise around the room, disturbing the peace previously engulfing the room along with hot air seeping in from the outside. Then when that didn’t work, the two turned Seokmin’s laptop off and rudely interrupted Seokmin’s binge watching streak, which took plenty of time and commitment to reach. Lastly, and it’s the last thing they do because it eventually gets Seokmin up and out of the dorm, they turned his electric fan off and dragged it with them out the room. 

Ever since their air conditioning broke and maintenance never came around to fixing it, the three have come up with a rule agreeing to keep the electric fans on, so to cross this line meant coming to desperate measures, for both sides. 

Mingyu and Minghao waited in the living room right next to Seokmin’s room for nearly 20 minutes before he walked out, fanning his shirt and nearly panting at the two who stares at him concernedly.

“I want boba.”

//

The thing with going to school in a mostly liberal campus right across downtown is, a student with flaming pink hair like they’re back in their emo stages of high school could come walking in and no one would even bother to give them a second look.

Seokmin realized the safe boundaries of a nice suburban neighborhood had done him dirty and let him miss out on the city life. 

“What topic are you doing your psych essay over?” Mingyu asks over his laptop while his mouth is filled with thai tea and tapioca pearls. The three of them decided, in a desperate need of productivity and concentration, it was best to bring their studies and homework to the boba shop placed a conveniently 10 minute drive away from them, where there was both air conditioning and the social pressure of looking responsible so as to stop them from streaming their illegally downloaded movies. 

Seokmin thinks he hears Minghao’s response, but he can’t be sure when his attention is too preoccupied by the head of pink across the shop. 

The first thing Seokmin notices is how short the boy is, and if Seokmin guesses correctly, he’d be a whole head taller than him. His features were soft despite the look of indifference spread across his face as he waits for his order over the counter. The screen of Seokmin’s laptop in front of him fades to black and gives him a cue that maybe he’s spent long enough avoiding his work.

“Earth to Seokmin,” Minghao’s waving a hand in front of Seokmin and chuckles when he responds by blinking rapidly with a dumbfounded expression painting his face. “What’s got you daydreaming this time?” Minghao asks, sipping on his boba and rapidly typing up his essay. 

Seokmin sighs, messing with the mouse pad of his laptop to wake up the screen once again, brightening up to half a page of jumbled words pulled out of his ass and the cursor blinking at him and staring him down at the same time. “It’s been the same thing every time,” Seokmin says, typing down some more paragraphs about mannerisms and social cues that Seokmin’s never read about until nearly 10 minutes ago from a wikipedia page and suspicious pdf file from the third page of google searches.

“Are you talking about the tree?” Mingyu butts in and Seokmin nods. He shrugs, sighing yet again and leans back in his chair. 

“I’m sure it’s nothing, I have more stuff to worry about.” Seokmin says with a wave of his hand and ducking his head back down to bury it behind his laptop screen.

Seokmin doesn’t know how long he pretended to be productive before he can’t help but turn his head and realize the boy with pink hair hasn’t left yet. This time, he’s seated at a table with a friend, nodding his head and listening intently as he drinks his boba. Seokmin really shouldn’t be as intrigued as he is, but he notices a tattoo peeking from behind the right sleeve of the boy, an intricate design of what looks like the makeup of music notes. His fingers are slender, gentle with the way they wrap around the cup and brings it up to his lips. 

“Hey, Mingyu, isn’t that Seungcheol from your economics class?” Minghao bumps his elbow into Mingyu’s side and tugs on his earphones until Mingyu stops chewing the cap of his pen and looks up to the table across the room. It takes no time for Mingyu to process who he’s looking at before he’s smiling and getting up, sauntering right to where the boy with pink hair is sitting. Mingyu doesn’t talk to him beyond a smile and wave, but chatters away to his friend who’s smiling and still holding onto Mingyu’s hand from after their small handshake.

At some point, Mingyu points back to their table and his friend smiles and waves. Minghao stops in his rapid typing to wave back, and Seokmin’s just about to do the same thing, but suddenly he’s not looking at Mingyu, or his friend, but rather the pink haired boy. 

Seokmin doesn’t know who was looking first, but just as quick as their eyes met, the pink haired boy looked away, looking back to Mingyu and his friend, who was now saying their goodbyes and parting ways. 

//

As much as Seokmin enjoyed his little “study” sessions with his roommates at the boba shop, the social pressure to always buy a drink at the shop every time they came was taking a toll on Seokmin’s wallet, and considering he never pushed himself to get a job and earn something (he’ll regret that later on), the boba shop was put on pause for a while.

So now, Seokmin finds himself in his next best choice, also called the library. 

He sits in the community table, all of which is to himself at the moment, because Seokmin’s learned the temptation to either take a nap or click his way to 123movies.com in a secluded table in the back of the room is too strong for him to resist. It’s not too long before someone comes up to the table by him. For the first time in a while, Seokmin’s too invested in the essay he’s cranking out to look up at the approaching figure, so he misses that the student coming up to the community table happens to be the pink haired boy from the boba shop the other day. 

While Seokmin’s busy flipping through his textbooks and the minimal notes he took during lecture, he misses how he and the pink haired boy start yawning at the same time, both of their hands coming up at the same time to cover their widening mouths.

The sluggish state the two were in would’ve been a relatively normal sight if it wasn’t for the fact that their actions were in sync with each other— no matter what they did, they did it together. 

Seokmin looked at the time at this clock on his screen, which read 10:30pm. Seokmin thought he had enough willpower to push through the late hours of the night, but the drowsiness he was feeling didn’t let him go back to those thoughts before Seokmin was shutting his eyes and laying his head for a nap in the middle of the library.

//

The calls of the cicadas could be mistaken for rain showers, if he opened his ears a little more. The late summer breeze was enough for him to pretend each swipe against his skin was a drop of water coming from the clouds above him. It was always calm during the summer when it too hot for children to be outside. The two could pretend they had the world to themselves.

The rustle of the leaves from the tree above them was apparently enough to wake the sleeping head on Seokmin’s shoulder. When he turned his head, Seokmin could see soft features, perfect for the spring, when the flowers bloomed. This time around, he has a head of brown hair, tangled and tousled and perfect for a child of six years old. He’s seen this before, but it still feels just as new, just as strange.

Seokmin knows his name for some reason and says it as though it belongs on his lips.

“Jihoon.”

The boy, who was still rubbing his eyes and trying to pull himself away from the daze of dreaming, turned to look at Seokmin. 

Seokmin things the boys face would suit the color pink quite nice. 

But before he could think about that, Seokmin’s being washed away, and all Seokmin could see was blue. The air was heavy all around him and for a second he forgot what the process for breathing was, but when Jihoon’s face was all he could think of, Seokmin’s chest expanded, his heartbeat was racing once more, and sleep was no longer on his mind.

//

Seokmin jolts awake, and he’s not sure if it’s the dream that woke him up, or the loud sound of something dropping on the floor across him. Either way, he lifts his head and the figure in front of him is rubbing his eyes, apparently also waking up. He’s turning to his side to pick up the journal he’s dropped, but when he lifts back up and meets Seokmin’s eyes, the air turns heavy and all Seokmin can see was blue.

“Had a good sleep?” 

Seokmin nods, dumbstruck and at a loss of words. He can’t help himself but stare at the face of soft features in front of him. 

“Yeah, just had a weird dream.”

Jihoon smiles a smile. 

“Yeah, me too.”


End file.
